Ep 801: What Does AI-First Really Mean?
Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?Show Notes
A growing number of organizations are rushing to put AI to work, often announcing themselves as AI-first before working out what that actually means. What many are finding is that AI tends to surface whatever was already underneath. Where the data is patchy, the content conflicting, and no one quite owns the end-to-end process, the technology exposes all of it rather than fixing any of it.
At the same time, AI is starting to reshape work itself, raising hard questions about which tasks remain genuinely human and what HR and TA roles will look like on the other side.
So what does it take to build foundations solid enough to make these tools deliver?
My guest this week is Mark Stelzner, founder and managing principal at IA. In our conversation, Mark explains what it really takes to make AI work in the people function.
In the interview, we discuss:
What are the driving forces and catalysts for transformation?
How AI amplifies rather than fixes existing problems
What does AI first actually mean?
Re-inventing processes in large complex organizations
AI’s impact on work
Displaced skills, amplified skills, and uniquely human skills
Turning capacity into new value
The impact of transformation on people and culture
The new role of the CHRO
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A full transcript will appear here shortly.
More from Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?
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AI is moving from a specialist technology to something employees in large parts of the organization are increasingly expected to be using. Skills, mindsets, and long-established habits are much harder to change than software, which is why meeting that expectation is proving difficult. If the challenge is mainly a human one, AI readiness is as much a matter for HR and talent leaders as for technology teams. So what does it take to get a workforce ready for AI, and what opportunity does that create for talent leaders?
Redundancies have become a constant feature of the talent market. AI is taking a lot of the blame, but the drivers behind this are much broader. Jobs and skills are changing faster than most organizations can keep track of and the conventional response is to restructure the workforce and then hire in the new skills that are needed. That approach relies on a ready supply of perfectly qualified candidates, and in a fast-moving skills market those candidates are increasingly hard to find. It also assumes that employers already have a clear view of the skills and potential within their existing workforce, which is rarely the case.
There is a lot of pressure on talent acquisition to adopt AI, and the discussion about how to do it tends to focus on tools and skills. With layoffs attributed to AI in the headlines, the people in TA teams have good reason to feel anxious about the technology they are being asked to use. That anxiety makes people less willing to experiment, and addressing it has less to do with the technology than with how leaders handle uncertainty.
TA leaders have to keep delivering for the business while they use AI to transform how hiring works. At RecFest USA in Nashville, AI was the main topic of conversation, although the people I spoke to talked about much more than the technology. So where should TA leaders be focusing their attention?